People don’t hate the dentist because of the drills and the scrapers and the trying to answer questions with a bunch of junk jammed in their mouths.

OK. They kind of hate the dentist for those reasons.

But the reason people really hate the dentist is because they treat you like you’re 12. Everything’s a lecture. You’re not flossing enough. You’re not brushing six times a day. You chew too much gum or drink too much coffee or play too much hockey. It’s always something with them.

It doesn’t help that my dentist assumes that I might, in fact, still be a minor. Witness the following exchange:

Dentist: Hi Daniel. Good to see you again.

Me: Hi. How are you?

Dentist: So, how’s school going?

A little background: I’ll be 31 in less than two months. I’ve held the same full time job with benefits for five years. I have two kids, two car payments and I don’t understand teenagers. By most standards, I’m an adult.

But this sort of thing happens to me often because some time around the age of 18 my body decided it was done. This was the end result. No more aging for me.

I’m constantly told that it’s not such a bad thing to look so young or that I’ll appreciate it some day, but it’s hard to feel like that when I’m getting ID’d to buy a lottery ticket or when the door man at a bar laughs when he checks my driver’s license. Grocery store clerks stand at the ready to page their managers when I take a six pack out of the cart and place it on the conveyor belt.

And now my dentist wants to know how school is going. I think for a minute that it might be fun to go along with this - to tell him that I just made varsity and I’m trying to decide between staying at home or studying abroad once I graduate. I could tell him that I decided I don’t need no stinking school and I’m crashing on my friend Bill’s couch for now because my parents won’t let me come home. I could just shrug and stay quiet in the best apathetic teen response I can muster.

But before I can do any of it, he realizes his gaffe and quickly covers it up by laughing and assuring me that it’s not such a bad thing to look so young and that, some day, I’ll appreciate it.